It will be appreciated that sailing vessels such as sailboats and motorboats require a mooring or boat slip to attach to when coming into port. Leaving a mooring is not an issue. Rather finding the mooring again or finding a guest mooring at the end of a boating event is oftentimes a problem. Moorings may be marked by color, number or other indicia. However, regardless of whether the mooring is identified, it may not be viewable from a distance or may be obscured by fog or other boats in the area.
In broad daylight, experienced sailors who have identified their mooring location before departure, find it difficult to find the mooring after a race. Either the indicia was rotated away from view, or other boats had since moved, or the line-up with a land marker had shifted. And this problem locating a mooring happens in a field as small as about 30 moorings. Add to this basic dilemma a heavy breeze, a few extra boats all searching for their mooring, particularly as they all come in after a race, a larger more crowded mooring field, and there could be collisions from boats tacking in close quarters, all trying to find their moorings.
For instance, in Marblehead Harbor alone there are 2600 moorings, with the boats moored side-by-side with very little maneuvering room. When coming into the harbor it is oftentimes not possible to even see the mooring for which one is headed and certainly not to be able to identify it at any distance. This is even further complicated by fog or in driving rain such that it is oftentimes impossible to locate the correct mooring buoy. In such a situation ordinarily a boat has to circle the mooring field a number of times in order to be able to identify the correct mooring.
Some prior systems for indicating buoy location by lights atop the buoy are designed for buoys that carry large heavy battery packs recharged with wave action and are totally unsuitable for use as mooring sticks common with recreational boating moorings. These buoys are difficult to remove from the water at the end of the season and difficult to waterproof. Other prior systems for indicating mooring location by lights atop the mooring are designed to be powered by solar cell arrays. It will be appreciated that solar cells used to power illuminated buoys are too unwieldy to be conveniently plucked from the water. Other recreational boating devices that require wave action energy are simply too cumbersome for use on seasonal mooring sticks. Further, prior art lighted mooring sticks lack an adequate counterweight for keeping the stick upright.
For instance the system described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,763,126 does not carry the power source at the base of the mooring stick but rather locates the apparatus for powering the light in the buoyant central package midway up the mooring stick and thus provides no ballasting. U.S. Pat. No. 4,903,243 requires a rechargeable battery which either requires solar cells or wave action to recharge the battery. This type of system precludes its use on a mooring stick.
It will be appreciated that long life for a lighted mooring beacon is important so that it can last an entire boating season without battery replacement. This is because access to the mooring is not convenient in many instances and battery replacement or recharging is a nuisance. This power problem is particularly severe when one attempts to utilize a high intensity strobe light to identify the position of a mooring stick. Without a significant power source that can operate for a whole boating season, strobe-based systems are not useful in mooring beacons.
It is therefore important to provide a mooring beacon with a very high intensity 360° viewable light source on top of a mooring stick that can be viewed from far away and yet has enough power in reserve so that the mooring beacon can be installed and used for entire boating season.